This Week’s Various

Sapelo Island, a tangle of salt marsh and sand reachable only by boat, holds the largest community of people who identify themselves as saltwater Geechees. Sometimes called the Gullahs, they have inhabited the nation’s southeast coast for more than two centuries. Theirs is one of the most fragile cultures in America.These Creole-speaking descendants of slaves have long held their land as a touchstone, fighting the kind of development that turned Hilton Head and St. Simons Islands into vacation destinations. Now, stiff county tax increases driven by a shifting economy, bureaucratic bumbling and the unyielding desire for a house on the water have them wondering if their community will finally succumb to cultural erosion.

William Christenberry has lived in Washington for more than 40 years, but he still regularly sifts the soil of his childhood home, rural Alabama. The South nurtures, inspires and probably terrifies him, as it has other noted artists and writers from the region. Christenberry’s current show at Hemphill Fine Arts, “Assembled Memory,” mixes it all together, much as it combines photography, painting and sculpture.The retrospective opens with “Alabama Wall,” assembled in 1975 from 32 found metal signs, rusted and weathered in various lovely ways. Every sign peddles Tops Snuff, and the repetition suggests a down-home Warhol. So does a silk-screen of the same signs, arranged differently and finished with hand-painted details. —

—The filming of ‘As I Lay Dying’ ends this weekend; the Clarion-Ledger writes:“To tell a universal story, you have to take a corner of the universe and write about that,” he said. “ Faulkner did that by setting up his fictional county, Yoknapatawpha.”

Nelso said this was one of his most challenging jobs.

“All of the characters in the book are full of so much detail,” he said, “and I have so many types of questions, but there are so many answers for them. … James Franco is really trying to find a film language just as when Faulkner wrote the novel in 1930. No American had ever explored stream-of-consciousness writing.”

—Esquire picks its best restaurants of the year, and they mention (in a section subtitled ‘The South Is Having a Moment, Praise Jesus’): The Southern Steak and Oyster – Nashville, TN – Only a handful of steakhouses have made the list over the years, largely because they tend to keep to a straightjacket menu and stereotyped machismo look. But The Southern Steak and Oyster is as appealing to women as it is to men. Order the Nudie Suit, a steak “tailored to your appetite” which means you go up to the counter, the chef sets his knife anywhere you like on a huge slab of well-marbled beef, cuts it, and then cooks the thing exactly the way you want it.

—The 1924 Randolph-Pickens house on Peachtree Street in Atlanta — it was built for Thomas Jefferson’s great-great grandson — is being offered free to anyone who will have it moved. But…the company that wants it moved so they can put in some features for a condo development won’t let people see it (you’d want to see what shape it’s in before you sink $300k+ into moving it, then $1MM+ more into a renovation) until the developers get a demolition permit. I know. Here’s the article from the AJC.

The NYT writes about Ole Miss’ commemorating 50 years since integration with ‘Opening the Closed Society‘.Professor King, who is 39 — and like more than half of all Americans was born after Mr. Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss — said he was troubled by how little his students knew about Mississippi’s history. There is nothing wrong with celebrating accomplishments, Professor King said, but he added that Ole Miss has an obligation to do much more.

“You have your memorials and you have your markers,” he said, “but you need to ask the harder questions. And that’s what a university’s for.” Also: NPR does ‘History Photographed, Then Hidden‘ on images taken of James Meredith once he was enrolled at Ole Miss:The images show Meredith, dressed sharp in a suit and tie, sitting at a desk, waiting for class to start. A few frames show some students at desks and a teacher at a blackboard. But as the sequence evolves, the classroom empties in protest. Even the person teaching the class exits. And then it’s just Meredith, sitting among empty desks littered with books and bags left by students in a rush to flee a room he’s in — because he’s in it.

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The peanut crop is coming in now; this is a pic at a peanut brokerage in…if Av were here, he would know for certain, but I think this was in Anguilla MS, in November 2005. In another area of the building, Av and the owner stood on top of all the peanuts and they must’ve been two or three stories up.

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Image by cvicknola used in accordance with Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0. Thank you!

—A new movie, All Hale, based in Hale County, Alabama with all kinds of Rural Studio projects as backdrops:

—The show ‘Home Strange Home‘ on HGTV is going to feature Phoenix Commotion homes on three upcoming episodes: October 26 (tree house), November 2 (bone house), and November 23 (Charleston house and license plate house).

—From the Jackson Free Press:Lucky Town recently teamed up with Hattiesburg-based Southern Prohibition Brewing Company to create a beer for Hurricane Isaac victims. For the beer, the two brewers caught 60 gallons of rainwater from Isaac. They had the water treated and brewed a dark ale with cinnamon, honey and scotch bonnet peppers called Kiss My Landmass.

Only about 40 gallons of the beer will be available. The Keg and Barrel in Hattiesburg will release the entire small-batch brew Oct. 5. A portion of the proceeds from Kiss My Landmass will go to the Red Cross of Mississippi.

—Food and Wine did a feature on ‘America’s Best Little Food Towns‘ and one of the six is Water Valley, MS — the best-named place on the whole list is in Marfa:Buns ’n’ RosesThis family-run café and florist serves delicious quesadillas and vegetarian salads, along with freshly baked muffins and lemon meringue pies made from a classic family recipe.

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It’s Sukkot; the pics above are of our sukkah this year. Shugie had all of his friends from kindergarten over one day! They did some little crafts, and I painted a couple of flat boards with chalkboard paint and put ‘Shalom Y’all’ at the top — they had a big time making all kinds of chalk drawings on that (which is why it looks kinda crazy above).